Soil

Cotton Incorporated has always taken a holistic approach to sustainability and environmentally friendly advances — and in the cotton industry, that means starting from the ground up: the soil itself.

Protecting the soil is paramount, and through techniques like conservation tillage and planting cover crops, cotton producers are able to conserve soil by preventing erosion and by actually helping to encourage soil creation.

Controlling soil erosion has been a key priority since the 1930s when poor farming management and a severe drought combined with huge soil losses due to wind erosion. Since then, farmers have relied on a number of techniques to manage this crucial asset:

• wind breaks, or planting trees in lines along crop fields to reduce wind erosion
• contour farming, which entails planting crop rows perpendicular to the slope of the land, to reduce water erosion
• conservation tillage, or preserving crop residue on the surface of the land, which prevents soil erosion.